by Michael Finley
Copyright © 1996 by Michael Finley

It is the day we set aside to commemorate the men and women in uniform who died to sustain our national idea, which is freedom. Unless you have a specific grandfather or aunt who died in battle, it is a slippery concept. How do you pay tribute to a generalization? Do you drive through a national cemetery, like the one at Fort Snelling, saluting the thousands of soldier's graves rolling by?

I have an idea, and it involves the Internet. You may know that freedom is a sacred word on the net. There are groups:

like the Electronic Freedom Foundation who fight to prevent Internet communications from coming under conventional governmental strictures.

like the Electronic Privacy Center that focus on the right to hide from others, via encryption and other technologies.

like the online militias and ultra-libertarian groups who bridle at the most microscopic concessions to community.

like the American Civil Liberties Union web site, which places freedom on such an absolute altar that the entirety of their time is consumed defending atrocities such as solicitations for child pornography and genocide.

like Cyperpromotions, Inc., commercial spam outfits who believe their right to annoy others with unwanted e-mail, at zero cost to them, is enshrined somewhere in the Constitution.

Which of these groups "owns" freedom? And who decides that?

It is possible that all these groups have their hearts in the right place, and in the event of an armed attack they may link arms and fight a common enemy. Until then they are fighting each other, each defending his blind-man-Industan notion of liberty.

Can you blame them for invoking it? "Free" is such a lovely syllable, that begins with tension between teeth and lip, and opens into a kiss of air. Like a trump card, you can use the word to win most any argument. I busted out laughing once at a Luis Bunuel movie. A fanatic was about to be executed by a firing squad. His last words: "Down with freedom!"

People just don't say that. Everyone is for freedom. We just define it the way it suits us best.

Let me suggest a unified usage for the word, that dates to the year of the Internet's invention, 1967. I graduated from high school that year, along with a classmate named Skeeter Barnes. His real name was Harold, but ever since Little League, when he was a scared little kid with a cheap fielder's mitt that looked like it had been run over by a car, I knew him as Skeeter. He lived on the town's crummiest street and his dad was the town drunk. When my folks packed me off for college, the Selective Service packed Skeeter off to Vietnam. Every five years now, the class has a reunion, and every time Harold Barnes heads the list of the deceased.

I'm not saying Skeeter's death was a heroic victory for freedom. He certainly wasn't free. He was a draftee with lousy prospects, fighting a losing effort to keep some notorious crooks in power. For all I know, he died falling off the back of a truck. I can picture his face and imagine the terror he felt, so far from Ohio. Scared but hanging in there.

He's the kind of guy who wouldn't own a computer today. He'd be leery of it, and have no understanding of what it was good for, no sense of it connecting him with the world around him.

But it's the willingness of people like Skeeter to put themselves in harm's way, even when the cause may be a dubious one, that allows us to have a relatively open society, one that can make a present to the world of something as thrilling as the Internet -- free, open, global, interactive communication.

Go back through the generations, from war to war, and imagine all the people who fought so that their kids could have opportunities, and the children of strangers could be free. I think it was less patriotism than love that drove them to their ends. It was the belief that they were connected to us across the generations by blood. Would the past understand the future? Probably not. But they loved us, and made it their purpose to clear space in time for us to settle.

Now fast forward to the virtual territory of cyberspace, and all the groups clamoring to have their definition of freedom prevail over everyone else's. Everyone is so sure of his lock on liberty, that any compromise, any effort to understand the other side's position is a betrayal of some rigid, sacred right.

The next time you hear someone shouting online about freedom, like it was their personal ticket to ride, give a thought to my friend Harold, knee deep in the Big Muddy. In the real world, freedom is intermittent at best, and usually occurs because someone shivering in his boots paid your way. Michael Finley is co-author with Harvey Robbins of Why Change Doesn't Work.Visit Michael Finley at his home page, or e-mail him at mfinley@mfinley.com

To contact Mike Finley ... mfinley@mfinley.com

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